It was no coincidence that homosexuals were among those who founded the Nazi Party. In fact, the party grew out of a number of groups in Germany which were centers of homosexual activity and activism. Many of the characteristic rituals, symbols, activities and philosophies we associate with Nazism came from these organizations or from contemporary homosexuals. The extended-arm “Sieg Heil” salute, for example, was a ritual of the Wandervoegel (“Wandering Birds” or “Rovers”), a male youth society which became the German equivalent of the Boy Scouts. The Wandervoegel was started in the late 1800s by a group of homosexual teenagers. Its first adult leader, Karl Fischer, called himself “der Fuehrer” (“the Leader”) (Koch:25f). Hans Blueher, a homosexual Nazi philosopher and important early member of the Wandervoegel, incited a sensation in 1912 with publication of The German Wandervoegel Movement as an Erotic Phenomenon, which told how the movement had become one in which young boys could be introduced into the homosexual lifestyle (Rector:39f). The Wandervoegel and other youth organizations were later merged into the Hitler Youth (which itself became known among the populace as the “Homo Youth” because of rampant homosexuality. - Rector:52).
Many of the Nazi emblems, such as the swastika, the double lightning bolt “SS” symbol, and even the inverted triangle symbol used to identify classes of prisoners in the concentration camps, originated among homosexual occultists in Germany (some, such as the swastika, are actually quite ancient symbols which were merely revived by these homosexual groups).
In 1907, Jorg Lanz Von Liebenfels, a former Cistercian monk whom the church excommunicated because of his homosexual activities (Sklar:19), flew the swastika flag above his castle in Austria (Goodrick-Clarke:109).
After his expulsion from the church Lanz founded the Ordo Novi Templi (“Order of the New Temple”) which merged occultism with violent anti-Semitism. A 1958 study of Lanz, Der Mann der Hitler die Ideen gab (“The Man Who Gave Hitler His Ideas”), by Austrian psychologist Wilhelm Daim, called Lanz the true “father” of National Socialism.
List, a close associate of Lanz, formed the Guido von List Society in Vienna in 1904. The Guido von List Society was accused of practicing a form of Hindu Tantrism which featured sexual perversion in its rituals. This form of sexual perversion was popularized in occult circles by a man named Aleister Crowley who, according to Hitler biographer J. Sydney Jones, enjoyed “playing with black magic and little boys” (J. S. Jones:123). List was “accused of being the Aleister Crowley of Vienna” (ibid.:123). Like Lanz, List was an occultist; he wrote several books on the magic principles of rune letters (from which he chose the “SS” symbol). In 1908, List “was unmasked as the leader of a blood brotherhood which went in for sexual perversion and substituted the swastika for the cross” (Sklar:23). The Nazis borrowed heavily from List’s occult theories and research. List also formed an elitist occult priesthood called the Armanen Order, to which Hitler himself may have belonged (Waite, 1977:91).
The Nazi dream of an Aryan super-race was adopted from an occult group called the Thule Society, founded in 1917 by followers of Lanz and List. The occult doctrine of the Thule Society held that the survivors of an ancient and highly developed lost civilization could endow Thule initiates with esoteric powers and wisdom. The initiates would use these powers to create a new race of Aryan supermen who would eliminate all “inferior” races. Hitler dedicated his book, Mein Kampf, to Dietrich Eckart, one of the Thule Society inner circle and a former leading figure in the German Worker’s Party. (Schwarzwaller:67). The various occult groups mentioned above were outgrowths of the Theosophical Society, whose founder, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, is thought by some to have been a lesbian (Webb:94), and whose “bishop” was a notorious pederast named Charles Leadbeater.
The SA Brownshirts or Stuermabteilung (“Storm Troopers”) were largely the creation of another homosexual, Gerhard Rossbach (Waite, 1969:209). Rossbach formed the Rossbachbund (“Rossbach Brotherhood”), a homosexual unit of the Freikorps (“Free Corps”). The Freikorps were independent inactive military reserve units which became home to the hundreds of thousands of unemployed World War I veterans in Germany. Rossbach also formed a youth organization under the Rossbachbund, calling it the Schilljugend (“Schill Youth”) (ibid.:210). Rossbach’s staff assistant, Lieutenant Edmund Heines, a pederast and murderer, was put in charge of the Schilljugend. The Rossbachbund later changed its name to Storm Troopers (in honor of Wotan, the ancient German god of storms. - Graber:33). Rossbach seduced Hitler’s mentor, Ernst Roehm, into homosexuality. It was under Roehm’s leadership that the Brownshirts became notorious for brutality.
Famous events in Nazi history are also linked to homosexuality; events such as the burning of the German Reichstag in 1932, the 1938 pogrom called Kristallnacht, and the 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life. Even the enduring image of Nazi book-burning, familiar to us from newsreels of the 1930s, was directly related to the homosexuality of Nazi leaders. The first such incident occurred four days after Hitler’s Brownshirts broke into Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin on May 6, 1933. On May 10 the Nazis burned thousands of books and files taken in that raid. The Institute had extensive records on the sexual perversions of numerous Nazi leaders, many of whom had been under treatment there prior to the beginning of the Nazi regime. Treatment at the Sex Research Institute was required by the German courts for persons convicted of sex crimes.